I agree. Basically now, there's very little point in playing without the £20 investment - you might as well consider the free gameplay a demo, and the £20 as payment to actually play the game. But the psychology of it is weird to me, is the thing. For twenty bucks I could buy a great indie game, indeed I could buy several for that amount of money. Is this game worth £20 to me? Not really. And yet I'm probably going to buy the Miracle Ticket in Kamihime - but that's £50 for an SSR and basically nothing else: the "value for money" for the ticket is much worse than value for money here, with the starter pack. But I feel that self-justifying buying the ticket is much easier, because it is far more optional, compared to here where playing without access to the coin boost feels to me like it would be so slow as to be pointless. Or maybe it's that I don't want to pay for something that was previously free? I don't know.
Anyway, I'll watch this game to see if they patch it to make it more reasonable (although I'm not sure how they'd do that), but I'm not actually going to bother playing it anymore until they do.